Using the powers of the debugger to solve the problems of the world - and a bag of chips
by Tess Ferrandez, ASP.NET Escalation Engineer (Microsoft)

Tess Ferrandez

I work as a developer evangelist at Microsoft, and my job is to help
developers make the most of their skills on the MS stack.

In this blog I share tips on anything from debugging and troubleshooting to
development on platforms like Windows, Web, Windows Phone and Kinect. And also some random
tidbits about computing and my life at MS.

If you have hangs, performance, memory issues, exceptions or crashes in Silverlight applications you can debug them using windbg and sos just like you would if the issues occurred in other .net applications.
The difference is that Silverlight in IE runs a subset of the framework where the main dll is coreclr.dll rather than mscorwks.dll so you can't use the regular 2.0 version of sos.dll that you can find in the framework directory. Instead you can install the Silverlight Developer Runtime from...

I know I'm a little late in the game, but I decided that after vacation it was finally time for me to install Windows 2008 on my Vista box and play around with some of the IIS 7 features like Failed Request Tracing (known as FRT or FREB) and the appcmd tool.
I wanted to show you an alternative way of troubleshooting Lab 1 (hang scenario) from my Debugging Lab series using Failed Request Tracing and appcmd so here are some things I will go through in this post
Setting up failed request tracing...

I got an email with some questions around application domains, application pools and unhandled exceptions from a developer that was frequently seeing his website crash, and also had some related issues with session loss in his application.
I have written before about unhandled exceptions and session loss due to appdomain restarts but I thought his questions would serve as a nice refresher.
From what i read, my understanding is that a website has an app pool associated with it. This app pool...

Earlier this week I was doing a presentation and since the company I presented for had mostly winforms developers I wanted to convert all my ASP.NET debugging demos to winforms equivalents for the presentation.
As I was converting my first demo (a performance issue) I ran into a bit of a snag because the first time I ran the demo (which populates 4 datagridviews with product information) things worked fine. I clicked the Featured Products button, my datagrids were nicely filled, I could reproduce...

A while back I posted about Failed Request Tracing in IIS 7 and I mentioned the command appcmd list requests which lists the requests that are currently executing in the process...
I was playing around a bit with UI Modules in IIS7, you know the ones that show up in the Features view when you open up a site in IIS 7...
... and I decided to create one that displays the requests that are currently executing...
This is a step-by-step of how I created it, along with a few notes about...